Going Under

By Jeffe Kennedy

Game designer Emily Bartwell is in hiding. Fleeing online trolls that ruined her career, marriage, and life—pretty much in that exact order—she’s made a new life on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, it’s lonely, but she has her online community for company. And she has her work: Labyrinth, a wildly popular role-playing game, one she’s created under the male alias, Phoenix.

When sexy writer, Fox Mullins, rents the beach house next door, however, he entices Emily out of her isolation. Flirting, teasing, igniting desires she’d forgotten she had, Fox tempts Emily into playing games of a very different sort—ones where he makes the rules.

Fox is delighted by his luck in discovering his gorgeous, single neighbor’s simmeringly passionate nature under her oh-so-private exterior. Playing with her, pushing the lovely Emily’s boundaries, gives him relief from the painstaking, frustrating task of tracking the brilliant gamer, Phoenix—and discovering his elusive prey’s true identity. Exposing Phoenix will be the biggest scoop of his career as an undercover tech reporter.

As Fox and Emily push the limits of intimacy, they discover that their fling is leading to something much deeper. They’re both keeping secrets that could devastate the other, but which of them will win the game in the end?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffe Kennedy
• Release date: Oct 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958679302

Jeffe Kennedy

Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning, best-selling author who writes fantasy with romantic elements and fantasy romance. She is an RWA member and serves on the Board of Directors for SFWA as a Director at Large. She is a hybrid author who also self-publishes a romantic fantasy series, Sorcerous Moons. Books in her popular, long-running series, The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted Realms, have won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance and RWA’s prestigious RITA® Award, while more have been finalists for those awards. She's the author of the romantic fantasy trilogy The Forgotten Empires, which includes The Orchid Throne, The Fiery Crown, and The Promised Queen. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine. She can be found online at her website, every Sunday at the SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and on Twitter.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

GO RUN. THIS MEANS YOU!

The pop-up reminder shook Em out of her zone, as she’d designed it to do.

Otherwise she’d forget. That was both the blessing and curse of programming. Time flew by—a good thing, because it kept her from dwelling on unpleasant thoughts. But, if she didn’t have her reminders, entire days could vanish without a trace.

She glanced at her screen clock—4:03—then surveyed the mist outside the window. No actual rain, but definitely murky. Resisting the urge to snooze the reminder 15 minutes, she resolutely saved her code and changed the pop-up to 3:37 for tomorrow. She’d have to keep it earlier until after solstice, the afternoons got so soupy.

Her twice-daily runs, plus occasional walks to contemplate work-throughs, gave her pleasure she’d rarely indulged in before. She really shouldn’t run the same routes every day, but the simplicity and ritual of it tempted her too much. She made up for that repetition by changing the reminder time every day, sometimes later, sometimes earlier.

Complacency killed.

And really, with all the other steps she’d taken to disguise her identity and virtual footprint, this deviation from protocol shouldn’t be enough to out her. When she’d first moved to the island, she’d taken care to vary her routines, trying to never repeat the same pattern twice. But that kind of thing got amazingly exhausting over time. Vigilance required a level of alertness and interest. Even following a habit of variability grew boring and that led to dullness. After the first year, she’d allowed herself certain habits that she deemed low risk and saved the edge of paranoia for higher-risk events.

Like grocery shopping.

Reluctant to leave the work, she made herself stand. She wouldn’t find her way through the latest knot in the next hour—or even the next week. Any further delay and she wouldn’t be able to see. Her body creaking in protest demonstrated the other reason to get moving. Submerged in her online life, behind the various masks of her false faces, it was easy to forget to be a human being.

Living alone also did that.

Not that she minded so much. She’d never been tremendously social to begin with and she really loved that things stayed clean after she cleaned them, were never dirty unless she dirtied them, and everything remained in its place. But she did tend to lose track of time.

Dinah opened one baleful golden eye from her sprawl on the top tier of the cat condo with an excellent view of both the bird feeders and Lyra Sound, ignored all of it and went back to sleep. Em rubbed the Maine coon’s belly anyway. Moving with more purpose, she headed to the bedroom, shucked cuddly socks and sweats, and pulled on her leggings, jog bra and zippered jacket. Yanking her hair into a ponytail took a bit of wrestling. Amazing what three years of no haircuts produced.

Her personal calendar of hermitage.

She paused in the mudroom to tie on her running shoes, still muddy from the morning’s run, but it hardly seemed worth it to clean them when she’d only dirty them again, then abandoned the cloistered warmth of the house for the misty green outside.

Anansi stood with tail high at the garden gate. He made an excellent reminder, too—usually knowing the time far better than she did—but the Doberman preferred to spend his afternoons outside. Given his propensity for pacing and sighing, she preferred it too.

Ready to go? Her voice croaked a little, as she hadn’t spoken aloud for hours save muttering at her screen.

Though Anansi could easily clear the low gate, he waited, ever polite, for her to open it, bounding through and making a wide loping circle around her while she stretched out her kinks. At her hand signal, he trotted down the cedar-planked path to the beach.

She loved many things about her house on Lyra Island—the windows, the view, the quiet of the sheltering trees and her fairy-worthy garden—but easy access to the rocky beach had sold her on it, despite the breathtaking price she’d paid in cash.

In some ways, it might have been easier to hide in a major metro area, where efficient businesses delivered food and she might have varied her running trail via an algorithm that recalculated her route over city blocks. A remote island, geographically circumscribed and populated mainly by tourist traffic in the summer and a small group of taciturn and hardy year-rounders, lacked both efficiencies and variability.

She let Anansi choose the direction. Her nod to randomness, such as it was.

However, she reflected as she found her rhythm on Lyra Sound’s gravel shore, becoming part of the community had lent an unanticipated kind of disguise. People made assumptions about her—about where the money came from, her eccentric reclusiveness, even her appearance—that cloaked her better than anything she might have crafted. They figured her for a crazy trust-funder refugee from the East Coast and she, always up for a good story, played into that.

Her neighbors knew her patterns and told her things about herself that she used as they puzzled out her mystery. Kind of similar to building a game, right there. A series of clues created a story. The trick became keeping anyone from wanting to look for more, because what they thought they knew was so much prettier than the reality.

She sometimes envisioned her real self as the unsightly creature behind the curtain, working the levers. That self shouldn’t ever see the light of day, so twisted and emotionally crippled, every horrible thing the trolls had ever named her.

It deserved to be locked away.

She hit her stride, the soft mist breathing easily through her, blood and muscles gratefully expanding after the day’s inactivity. Anansi looped through the shallow water and out again in canine glee. Running under the draping emerald fronds, she counted the lights in the houses of her widely spaced neighbors, making a mental note that someone seemed to have moved into the Kapsucks’ rental on the point.

Odd time of year for it.

Her sense of vigilance pricked. A trip into town in the morning would be in order, to suss out this unusual arrival.

You could never be too careful.

Fox stood out on the deck, watching the woman jog past on the beach with a dog he’d first mistaken for a pony. No, just a very impressive Doberman.

She ran with a ground-eating, gliding stride that spoke of years of practice. Maybe even a youth as a long-distance runner. He added the observation to his mental checklist, second nature in his line of work, to what he’d taken in about her during the thirty seconds it had taken her to cross in and out of sight—lean, glossy dark-brown hair, top-of-the-line running clothes and shoes, obvious even in the dimness. Healthy dog, not professionally groomed or docked. Probably a permanent resident, eccentric and rich with it.

The way he had it figured, his quarry made very good money, which was part of what let him avoid detection. Could the elusive game designer be married or have a girlfriend?

Fox didn’t think so, but he needed to consider all possibilities. A knack for finding the unexpected clues was one of the skills that put him at the top of his profession. Noting the time and her description on one of the pocket pads he always carried, he waited for the woman’s return loop. Night had nearly taken the shoreline, despite the early hour, so she’d hardly be able to stay out much longer. In L.A., sunset would be over an hour away—and you’d be able to see it, something prevented by the seemingly ever-present pea soup on Lyra. He’d only been on the island a day and already the dark was getting to him.

Not that it mattered. Sniffing out Phoenix’s hiding spot and real identity would be the brass ring. He could write his own ticket after that, have his pick of assignments and live in the sunniest spot he could find. The game designer was canny and had laid more false trails than Fox had expected. Grudging respect growing, he’d followed each set of manufactured clues to their blind endings, methodically debunking each one.

In many ways, the chase had become more fun than even playing Phoenix’s games—though both bore the distinctive flavor of the man’s personality. His voice, Fox thought of it, though that term was more often applied to writers than video game programmers. Still, the way Phoenix had built his layers of false identities and misdirections carried that same indelible stamp of the mind-boggling clues that formed the skeleton of the man’s games.

Most notably, Phoenix’s masterpiece, Labyrinth, an adventure game with new modules released regularly that had taken the market by storm two years ago, showed echoes of the various false trails that formed Phoenix’s obviously false identity.

Hell, the man hadn’t existed before three years ago, and Fox suspected some of that history had been created. Most people in the industry speculated that Phoenix must be the retirement identity of one of the gaming community’s veterans. Even among the network of anonymous hackers and basement dwellers, who lived and died by false identities, this guy eluded all efforts to decloak him. Something that spoke of long experience, the forums insisted.

In his gut, Fox knew better.

No, Phoenix had to be young. Middle-aged at most. Fox knew this, not from studying the data, but from playing the game, from knowing that voice. And he was here somewhere. Probably on Lyra, but maybe nearby. The inside tip from his NSA buddy pointed to this cluster of islands in the middle of nowhere as having the broadband signature a guy like Phoenix would need.

Intuition told him a guy who picked the name Phoenix wouldn’t be able to resist the parallel of Lyra Island. Instinct, some would call it. Fox didn’t care to name it. Call it superstitious, but he didn’t question intuition.

His brand of investigative journalism required tenacity, ruthless conviction and more than a little black magic.

Always trust your gut, Sparky. The brain can lie, but your instinct knows all.

While Fox obviously had long stopped following most of his wastrel father’s advice, he kept the best of it. And he always found his quarry.

So, while his competitors broke in to ISP records and plodded after the electronic breadcrumbs to nowhere, Fox had followed that instinct—luck and serendipity—to Lyra. Working on his novel, he’d told the inquisitive Gladys Kapsuck. He needed the quiet.

He’d bide his time, catch up on the backload of articles he’d been meaning to write—maybe try his hand at a few more short stories, to flesh out his cover if nothing else—and wait for Phoenix to reveal himself. Which he would. No one could hide forever.

And there came his jogging neighbor, clocking in seventeen minutes later. He noted it down as he’d track everyone on the island. You never knew who might know the person who knew the person who knew where his target would be found. Six degrees of separation.

Luck is a lady—always treat her like one.

He went inside to enter it all in the computer.

And maybe play a little Labyrinth.

CHAPTER TWO

Good morning, Rob! Em called out over the tinkling bell on the coffee shop door.

The aging hippy set his week-old paper aside and came to the counter. Look who’s out and about already this fine morning.

Em stowed her drenched umbrella in the stand by the door. Had a craving for a mocha. Regular coffee wasn’t going to cut it today.

I suppose it being Thursday and Tree’s cinnamon-roll day had nothing to do with it. He’d already started steaming the almond milk he kept on hand for her and for Steve Baker, lactose intolerant and enough of a health nut to be concerned about the feminizing steroids in soy milk. Another unexpected benny of small-town life—once you picked your favorite thing, people remembered it.

Fortunately she liked the triple-shot almond milk mochas she’d randomly picked that first visit to the coffee shop. Not so much with other things, such as Tree’s organic cinnamon rolls, which were never sweet enough. With those and a few other dishes she’d carelessly chosen those first few weeks, thinking the more random and the further from her real preferences the better, she’d gotten locked into some usuals she’d grown to actively despise.

But she couldn’t break character now.

Of course! You know I love Tree’s rolls. And dammit—she’d thought it was Wednesday and she’d be safe. Maybe she needed a day-of-the-week reminder too.

You haven’t been in for one in a while, Rob observed, boxing up two for her. Tree was making noises about bringing some out to you. She thought you might be sick, but then she saw you running a couple of times.

You know how it is. She shrugged, adding a yawn for good measure. This time of year I hibernate. And paint.

Yup. He nodded along, then asked, politely but with a bit of reluctance Em enjoyed no end, How is the painting coming?

Great! She put some extra gushing in her response, just to see him wince. Payback for the cinnamon rolls. I’ll bring some more down.

He started to frown but managed to stop himself. Three of her works already hung on the coffee shop walls. Hideous abstracts she dashed out in minutes and claimed to toil over for months.

She took pity on him. I’m doing a lot of yellow these days. Maybe we could swap the new ones out for these from my brown period.

Oh yeah? That’ll brighten things up. Rob didn’t deserve her needling, but she got such a kick out of it. Small pleasures.

I saw someone rented the Kapsuck place. She introduced her real reason for coming into town casually, plucking a copy of the local Thrifty Nickel from the stand.

Rob painstakingly ground a few more beans to make enough for her third shot. He believed that anything less than perfectly fresh grounds led to corporate coffee. She’d learned not to get him started on Starbucks.

Some writer from L.A., I hear.

Interesting. Would I know his books?

I don’t. Tree Googled him and he writes short stories—sci fi, she said—name of Fox Mullins. Guess he’s working on a novel.

Isn’t everyone? Em quipped.

Not me. Rob huffed a laugh and finally handed her the mocha and the box of rolls. I’m happy with my garden and my weed. Tree keeps making noises about writing a book someday, but so far all that comes out of her is these cinnamon rolls.

And we love ’em. Em made a show of breathing in the fragrance, unfortunately tinged with the skunky odor of Rob’s beloved weed. You forgot to charge me for two, though.

Rob waved a hand. On the house. With visitors down for the winter, we’ve got ’em coming out of our ears, going stale. That writer fellow, Fox, though, came in earlier and bought a dozen. If Tree wasn’t half in love with him already, she’d have swooned over him for that alone.

In love cuz he’s a writer?

That. Plus she’s always had a thing for redheads. Something about him being ‘abtastic’ too. Rob rolled his eyes and patted his comfortable gut. Scary where she gets this stuff. Too much satellite TV.

Em laughed. Tree and Rob forever tangled over the enormous dish Tree insisted she needed and he claimed sent bad vibrations into his marijuana plants. How’d she see his abs already?

She didn’t. Glory down at the PO claims she got an eyeful when he picked up some boxes. I worry about these women, Em.

Well, single men are scarce on the island—can’t really blame them.

Not you too. Rob groaned. Though better you than Tree, come to think of it. Keep him occupied, would you?

I’ll see what I can do. Has Glory been in for her coffee yet?

Nope. Mail came in early.

I’ll buy hers and stop by. I probably have deliveries anyway.

Glory had the post office open, the lights gleaming cheerfully through the morning murk. Spotting Em, she disappeared in back and reemerged with a dolly stacked with three boxes. Looks who’s emerged from hiding. I hope you drove. Oh, bless you, she breathed, taking the coffee. Short and curvy, with sweet curls and a milkmaid’s complexion, Glory could have been a character from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Until she opened her mouth.

In this downpour? Absolutely. Though I didn’t remember having this much on order. That made two unusual events in less than twenty-four hours. With a stab of anxiety, Em angled her head to read the top label for the sender information.

Looks like more books and something from a computer place. You know, you should really get an ereader—instant gratification and no crippling up your long-suffering, increasingly decrepit postmaster. Glory glowered, though her vibrant youthfulness belied her complaints. Or you can read on the computer too. Enter the new millennium already.

Call me old-fashioned—I prefer print books. It’s not good for us to be on computers so much. All that electricity is bad for my chakras too.

Glory toed the bottom box. Well, whoever sent this isn’t into the latest tech. Didn’t even know they made this kind anymore.

Who needs the newest thing? Amazing how some people waste their money.

Ain’t that the truth? Did you hear—this guy actually rented the Kapsuck place for the winter. Talk about a colossal waste. All that money for a view and he’ll be looking at fog the next three months.

Rob mentioned. Em leaned against the counter, sipping the mocha. Said you thought he’s cute.

No, no, no. Glory shook her head, brown curls bouncing. This guy is not ‘cute’ by any stretch. He is hot—Navy SEAL built and Tom Hiddleston charming. I know you don’t date, but in case you get ideas, I totally have dibs. He’s coming over for dinner tonight. She sighed dramatically and fluttered her hand over her heart. Momma is having some Fox!

Somebody moved fast.

Yes. Because once he’s been socked in for a week, I figure he’ll hightail it back to L.A. I fully intend to get laid before that. If you’re nice, I’ll let you have him when I’m done. If there’s time.

Em sucked down the last of her mocha, savoring the warm buzz in her bloodstream—heat, sugar and caffeine, for the win—and chucked the cup in the bin. Generous of you, but you can keep him.

A girl does not live by the vibrator alone.

Tell that to the battery companies.

Anansi bounced at the sight of her, evidenced by the rocking of her Jeep and a slab of tongue momentarily clearing the inner fog. After awkwardly wrestling with the dolly of packages, Em had given up on the umbrella and laid it across the top. She had to shower anyway.

She did, most days. Though sometimes she skipped it. Why bother when your pets didn’t care anyway?

How horrified her mother would be.

She double-checked the labels as she piled them in the passenger seat, out of Anansi’s tromping range. Two used bookstores and something from her boss, this time in a Gateway computer box, complete with dappled cowhide pattern. How Jared skunked up these ancient things, she had no idea. Okay, she suspected a series of Google and eBay alerts, but seriously. All she’d asked was that the things he absolutely had to send physically not have the Jacker Games branding. This was his way of getting around that and simultaneously yanking Phoenix’s chain as much as he dared. Jared didn’t love that she worked remotely, that he had to ship to her via a forwarding address, which added at least a week, and the constant barrage of inquiries about her identity annoyed him. But he did enjoy having the top-selling game on the market.

Besides, the enigma of Phoenix’s real identity just lent cachet to it all.

She let him have his little jokes to blow off steam. The nature of his ribbing had proved enlightening also, since he—along with everyone in the known universe—believed Phoenix to be male. Being admitted to the male-male wink-wink/nudge-nudge club gave her a subtle edge in preserving that illusion. It also salved some of those deeper wounds, to know she’d slipped inside the very barriers she’d dashed herself against.

As for the books, she’d donate most of them, keeping only the few she really wanted to read. Sometimes she amused herself by selling them back to the same used book sellers she bought them from, under another name. It helped to keep her various banking and PayPal identities active. That way, if she ever had to bail quickly, she should be able to access credit from at least one. Mixing up genres, languages and topics helped confuse the tracking algorithms.

She stayed clear of Amazon for that reason—unless she deliberately wanted to create a red herring to one of her false identities.

Back at the house, she turned Anansi loose in the garden, set the book boxes in her reading den, and carried the Gateway box to her programming desk. The multiple screens showed an echo of the view outside the big windows, a restful triplicate requiring three sets of passwords to unlock.

A sticky note tacked to a girly mag sat on top of the box’s contents. Jared’s latest attempt to discover Phoenix’s kink. Even if she was really a guy, she didn’t think Big Black Booties would have done it for her.

But hey, to each his own.

Prototype of the new console. If you can get it to dovetail, Alexander will kiss your pimply ass.

She snorted. Alexander wishes he could kiss my ass. But she withdrew the sleek console that so would not make it to market for Christmas, no matter how many emails Jared sent, ran a scan and added it to her testing network. A nice, private sandbox in case anyone had tried to sneak in a location ping.

Seeing it was after nine-thirty, she turned on her phone so it could warm up and do a bit of signal bouncing. Jared should be in his office. Probably cursing her rule that she would always call him. They had a team meeting scheduled for the afternoon, but she wanted to hear for herself how things were going before that.

Enjoying the thrill of a new gadget, she put the console through its paces in her test version of Labyrinth. Very slick, indeed. Big Black Booties might not do it for her, and Glory could knock herself out banging the new guy in town.

This would always be enough.

After all, she’d given up her life for it.

CHAPTER THREE

Fox glared balefully at the sheeting rain and adjusted the telescope the Kapsucks thoughtfully provided. Now that he’d gotten coffee, breakfast and lens cleaner—a damn shame how badly someone had treated the device—both he and the telescope enjoyed considerably more clarity.

His neighbor had run past at 7:09, barely before sunrise, though the shimmering gray hardly showed much more brightness than the pre-dawn light. Her energy in the face of the rain prodded him enough to put on pants and go into town. It had been a mistake to buy so many of those cinnamon bricks, thinking they’d last him the week.

Maybe they’d make good clay pigeons for shooting practice.

Restlessness gnawed at him. So close to the finish line on this one. He always had to yank himself back at this point, remind himself that the stealthy predator never alerted its prey. Move too soon and he’d risk spooking Phoenix. But the combination of cabin fever from the relentless rain and the lackadaisical attitudes of the local population might just conspire to drive him out of his mind first. He’d nearly throttled Rob at the coffee shop. Seventeen minutes to make a latte had to be a world record.

What he really needed was sex. That always worked him out of his tree, the kinkier, the better. Fortunately that adorable Glory at the post office seemed ready to oblige—with the added benefit of being someone who knew everyone’s business and cheerfully blabbed about it.

But that was tonight and he needed to work off this mood now.

Clearly—or not, he thought wryly—he could not wait for the rain to let up. A good, long run would take the edge off and the weather didn’t stop the long-legged trophy wife down the way. Might as well learn to live the way the locals did.

He took the lane at an easy jog, letting his muscles warm and trying to be philosophical about being soaked to the bone. Damned if he’d buy one of those slickers. Get wet and dry off again—no big deal, right? By the time he reached the wooden steps that led to the beach access for the point, he’d heated up plenty, but the rain sliding down the back of his neck was about to drive him crazy.

Get used to it, Sparky. You’ve been through worse.

Following instinct, which usually meant chasing whatever piqued his curiosity, Fox turned down the beach in his jogging neighbor’s direction. He might be able to ID the place from the dog alone. Pooches that size left their mark. Besides, not many of them looked occupied, he noted, passing the beachfront homes, most recessed into the verdant forest, verifying the information that very few people overwintered on the island.

But Phoenix stayed year round. All of Fox’s research pointed to it. The guy didn’t move around—although he went to a lot of trouble to make it seem like he did. Still, Fox’s gut insisted that Phoenix had gone to ground somewhere around three years ago and stayed there.

All Fox needed to do was find the hiding hole behind whatever local façade the guy used.

Could be Rob. Masquerading as the perpetually stoned barista and half-assed coffee shop owner could be just misleading enough. Seemed unlikely, however. Phoenix, famous for his productivity as much as his sheer genius, needed more time to work than babysitting a coffee shop most of the day